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Just over one year ago I released the WooCommerce Cookbook and I heard from lots of store owners about how much they liked it. And after hearing the feedback I decided to create something a bit less technical and more abstract. Something that would help people understand the fundamentals of e-commerce. Several months later I'm proud to say that I published WordPress eCommerce on Lynda.com.

The Course

The course covers everything you need to think about before you build an e-commerce site for yourself or for a client:

Understanding Your Market

Marketing Your Site

Selling Products

Shipping & Orders & Taxes

Securing Your Site

Using WordPress for eCommerce

Testing & Optimization

This is a video course so all of the lessons include me showing example sites and visual aids. It's over an hour long so there's plenty for you to digest before you make your first e-commerce site. Chapters 3 & 4 go into lots of detail about the types of products you can sell and the best way to do it. Ex. How can I sell a monthly subscription box? And which way is best?

Why I Created This Course

I created this course is because e-commerce is no longer limited by technology. You aren't spending your time figuring out technical problems. The technology is relatively straight forward and as a store owner or a developer building a store for a client you have to figure out marketing & positioning problems to make sure that your product solves a need and that people can find it.

Only once you know that people really want to buy your product and you can get them to your site do you worry about the technical problems.

I also cover third party platforms that can integrate in your WordPress site such as Gumroad, Clickbank, and Shopify.

If you're a store owner this course will make you ask questions about your product market fit and what you need to do to sell as many widgets as possible.

If you're a developer you will learn all of the same lessons which you can pass along to your clients and make them successful. Building a $10,000 site is great but it's even better if you can build the right site for $10,000 and get more work next year after your client's product makes a killing. 🙂

Delay

If you're detail oriented you might notice that this course actually came out last summer! I held off on the announcement of this post because it came out right around the time of the WooThemes acquisition and I was quite busy with all of that. Not a good excuse I know but better late than never right?

I love writing code snippets, plugins, and tutorials on my site. But no matter how good you make them there will be someone who wants to change it. Unfortunately it's just not possible to customize a snippet for every single person. So for that reason I've always recommended various WordPress agencies like Codeable. But in the last couple months I've had more and more requests for custom work so I thought I'd reach out to Codeable to really get to know them so I know that I'm recommending the best service.

If you've read this blog for a bit you'll know that I'm a big fan of Ninja Forms. Every couple of months I release a new extension which adds even more functionality to Ninja Forms and makes it even more powerful. What you might not know is that I'm also an affiliate. Every time someone follows one of my links to the Ninja Forms website and purchases something I get a small cut.

The way the affiliate system works is that I have a special link so the WP Ninjas know who referred the customer. Unfortunately, in most cases the links aren't intuitive, they're long, and sometimes they change which is a big pain to update. Instead of using the link as is you can cloak the link making it look like any other page on your site. Doing so makes it easier to read, they're easy to change, and there aren't any negative SEO affects on your site.

Best of all cloaking your links is actually easier than you think and can be done with just one WordPress plugin which you might already be using.

Someone once asked me about the WordCamps and meetups that are going on around Wisconsin and I was only too eager to reply “It's crazy! There are so many going on” and then there was laughing. This person couldn't fathom any real IT talent outside of Silicon Valley and that's a shame. Both for that person and for the innovators here that are doing great work and not being recognized.

I'm probably not the best Wiconsinite since I don't love the Packers. But I do want to give WI the credit is deserves. We have a lot of innovators, and a lot of activity both in meetups and other events. Here's some of the amazing talent in Wisconsin. (Apologies in advance if I forgot you there are so many awesome people!)

ThemeForest has a pretty bad rap in the WordPress world. It's incredibly popular for anyone who doesn't know anything about HTML & CSS because of the cheap prices and huge selection. There is of course a catch – the cheap prices reflect the quality of some of these themes. While the screenshots look nice the code infrastructure that you pay for is very poorly built. If you have any aspirations to use one of these themes in anyway other than the author intended you'll likely run into a whole bunch of issues. I recently modified a ThemeForest theme (which I'm not going to name) for a friend and here are just some of the issues I ran into.

Well hi there! Someone asked me an interesting questions today. They wanted to know how to embed audio into their WordPress site. Honestly it's really simple like really really simple. In fact, it works with WordPress out of the box. No plugins required. You can copy a song url from SoundCloud paste it into your post and it's done. I've created a video showing how simple it is.